Astro Boy (2009)

  This wasn't great, but it didn't suck as hard as I thought it would.

Toby Tenma (Freddie Highmore) is a boy genius, as to be expected when your father (Nicholas Cage) is the head of the Ministry of Science on your floating city above the Earth's surface.  Unfortunately, he is not smart enough to avoid getting locked in the same room as an experimental war robot ordered by a President (Donald Sutherland) hellbent on re-election.  Distraught, Dr. Tenma decides to create a robotic replica of his son, down to uploading the kid's memories.  He soon realizes that Toby 2.0 is never going to replace his kid.  Toby gets knocked down to the surface world and picked up by a group of kids, led by Cora (Kristen Bell).  He renames himself Astro and tries to assimilate to this new family, only to realize that wishing for something doesn't automatically mean it will happen.

I have never seen any of the old Astro Boy comics or the TV show, so as far as I was concerned, this was my introduction to the character.  I wasn't impressed.  There's nothing really wrong with it; there are just so many better movies about child robots that it seems silly to waste your time on this one.  The animation is good but not spectacular, the humor is flat, the side characters are mediocre, and the story has been done.  The voice cast is impressive but not enough to make it worth renting.  I think it was nominated for something several years ago and that's the only reason it was in my queue.